


Wing-Shadows

by Evandar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Communication, In the Cage, Inspired by Poetry, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 09:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3285833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are worse things than being trapped in the Cage. Michael's game of illusions is one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wing-Shadows

The sun shines brightly through his bedroom window. He can smell pancakes, hear the clattering of dishes as his mother moves around the kitchen, and he closes his eyes in something that’s not quite agony. When he opens them again, his ceiling is a canopy of blood-red feathers illuminated by fire and grace.

He feels the archangel sigh. Trapped in fire, his senses aren’t what they used to be. There is no sight or sound in the Cage as a human would understand it there is only the soul and what tortures it can conjure. Even the fire, Michael has told him, is a projection of what he thinks there should be. The Cage is a lie.

Michael is a lie. A liar, rather.

Red wings draw back. There are hundreds of them; billions of feathers – all the colour of a dying star. Michael’s true form is beautiful and terrible, and Adam loves him as much as he resents him.

Feathers part to reveal the night sky, scattered with stars, and Adam exhales a breath that freezes instantly into a spray of tiny ice crystals. The sky is beautiful, cloudless, and cold; he realises in a heartbeat that he’s looking at constellations up close. The memory is Michael’s this time. Stars and planets; burning rocks and glass spiralling outwards at unspeakable speeds as the universe is born to the sound of _”Let there be Light”_. Adam’s whole body vibrates with the echoes of the Word of God, and shelters from its power between the upraised palms of an archangel.

He could stay forever, watching worlds form on command, but in his peripheral vision, he sees the wings of other angels. Summery golden light; arching lightning; but it’s the cold chards of ice and crystal that make up Lucifer’s wings that make him close his eyes again.

“Stop it,” he says.

And they’re in the Cage again, surrounded by red and bathed in fire, and Michael’s incomprehension curls around him. That he doesn’t understand makes Adam want to laugh and cry all at once. The brilliant, ages-old archangel; oblivious. That Michael can know so much and so little is one of the greatest, most extreme contradictions Adam has ever found in another individual.

He wishes he could cry, but his eyes remain stubbornly dry as the world shifts again and Hell becomes a college lecture room. One of his old teachers stalks back and forth at the front of the room, reading from a textbook. Adam, sitting at the desk he usually claimed – in the middle row, but off to the side, nice and nondescript – sighs again. Michael could have chosen a better lecture; a better teacher. He glances at the seat next to him, but where Jenny MacIntyre used to sit there’s a guy.

He’s got short black hair and bright green eyes and the shadows of wings arch out of the back of his leather jacket.

Adam wonders, sour, who Michael wore before him. He was a good looking sucker, whoever he was.

“Psych 101?” he asks. That the teacher doesn’t stop talking – just lectures on about Freud and dreams and early-days psychoanalysis – and if he ever wanted a bigger clue that this is just a memory and nothing real, that’s it. 

“It does not interest you,” Michael replies. His vessel’s voice is deep, but the thunder of Michael’s true voice echoes through it, shuddering through Adam’s skull. If the classroom was real then laptops would have cracked and windows smashed. 

“Freud was full of it,” Adam says. “Full of crap,” he elaborates before Michael can open his mouth to ask. “He’s not... Look, why are you doing this?”

His response is a swirl of red feathers and the feel of a lush, vibrantly green lawn between his toes; his classroom replaced by a garden in less time than it takes to blink an eye. Treetops move in a wind that Adam can’t feel, and their heavy blossoms should have flooded the air with their scent, but they don’t. Every illusion, every memory, is becoming less real, as if the strain of imagining pleasantries in the Cage is becoming too much.

It’s a form of torture – Adam just doesn’t know if Michael’s torturing him, or himself.

“Eden,” Michael says, still wearing that guy with the handsome face. He speaks just as Adam decides that he’s torturing them both, and the sound of his voice makes his heart break a little bit more.

“Why?” he asks again.

“It was a place of peace,” Michael says.

Perhaps it was once, Adam thinks, but the garden conjured from Michael’s mind is eerie in its silence. He tries his hardest not to project that thought, but he knows that he’s failed when he feels the weight of Michael’s gaze upon him.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, because it is and because that gaze can see right to the very heart of him. He feels guiltier now than he’s ever been and he hates it. Hates that Michael can make him feel that way. 

He supposes that’s what love is.

“It’s just not what I want,” he continues. That his voice is the loudest thing in the garden is terrifying, and his words come out in a rush. “I don’t want to pretend that we’re free.”

Michael’s head tilts to the side. “You would rather the Cage than Eden.”

“Because it’s real. It’s Hell, yeah, but…this?” He doesn’t know how to explain it. Words trip over themselves on his tongue; collide with each other and leave him breathless in the silence as well as speechless, and for all that Michael can read minds and probably look right through him, there’s no way that he can understand without Adam finding a way to say it.

Stupid, oblivious, wonderful angel.

“I don’t want the illusion of freedom,” he says. “I’d rather just be free. But if I can’t get that, and… I know I never will, yeah? If I can’t be free then I’d rather not be tormented by the promise of it.”

Michael blinks. Eden evaporates. Adam is standing, cradled in Michael’s palms like he had been at the start of the universe, surrounded by feathers and the light of an archangel’s grace. There’s nothing human about the face studying him now; nothing animal either – Michael is further beyond words than freedom. But he’s real, like this, and Adam finds himself relaxing.

“We can be free here,” he says.

It’s probably a lie. The Cage will likely find a way to take his promise and break them, but for now, it seems to be enough. Michael gathers him close and tightens the cocoon of his wings around them both.

Adam thinks he hears him singing.

 

 _But don't tell me about freedom.  
Just let me see his face._ \- Ai Ogawa


End file.
